Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Ron Paul: ‘Secession is a deeply American principle’

True. But if you think it can happen without violence you mistake the bloody nature of the collectivist butchers we face. Besides, when it starts it will be war to the knife and knife to the hilt. Have no illusions about that either.
LATER: Glenn Reynolds chimes in "A solution to secession fever -- federalism." He's right, the secession petition business is silly. He's wrong assuming that either federalism or secession will be permitted by the collectivist enemies of the Constitution without a bloody civil war. He, too, mistakes their true character.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

France, Great Brittin,Spain all of Euroupa Was doing fine till some smartass came up with the current "union". GET THIS "union" DONT WORK. It never did. In order to have "union" you must have central government. I.E. A king,Central government ALLWAYS leads to civil war. Our civil war II has ALLREDY started. This is just the part where people chose sides. Pretty soon sombody steps on a stupid spot, Then all hell springs lose. Remember people ,before first Bull Run EVERYONE belived that civil war I(1861-1865) would be bloodless and short.

Anonymous said...

Secession, like rebellion, is an option which is guaranteed to receive a violent reply from entrenched authority. Secession, after all, is a form of rebellion. We all know how Mordor on the Potomac responded the last time a state had the unmitigated gall to attempt to secede. there is no reason to expect the statists in charge now to respond any differently.

Having the right or duty to do something does not mean that the powers that be will be willing to "allow" someone to exercise that right or fulfill that duty. The selfsame George Washington who was the supreme commander of rebel forces happily rode down others who had the gall to rebel against him and his cronies. And so it will always be.

Fortunately for the states considering secession, things are different than they were in 1861. Several of the states considering secession have powerhouse economies. Industrial might in the likely seceders is greater than most of the states one would expect to remain part of the union. Population shift and growth means the seceding states would not be out manned. If state guards remain loyal to their respective states, seceding states might well not be terribly overmatched in manpower. Add in the possibility of militia (and other) irregulars and suddenly the loyalist troops are facing numerically superior forces.

Replacing existing government is - so far as I have been able to determine - never accomplished peacefully. Liberty is always paid for in blood.

Anonymous said...

First, I'm all for secession, however, the issue that no one seems to talk about that is connected with secession is money.

I don't see secession even possible unless the state stops giving the federal government money and in return does not accept money from the federal government. A state can NOT be independent if they continue to receive grants from the feds.

Anonymous said...

I'm not surprised there are no other comments to this post. I've spent around 40 minutes trying to prove I'm not a robot. Most of the pictures you can't even see because they're blurry. If you try to listen to the sound, it's just as blurry as the print. Very frustrating. At this point, I feel driven to prove I'm not a robot.

That said, I'm all for secession, however, the issue that no one seems to talk about that is connected with secession is money.

I don't see secession even possible unless the state stops giving the federal government money and in return does not accept money from the federal government. A state can NOT be independent if they continue to receive grants from the feds.

Anonymous said...

Secession was the last check and balance against the Federal government being out of control, as even the most pro central government people like Hamilton stated.

Lincoln the tyrant did not want the power of the empire and a strong central government to be checked, so he was going to break whatever moral and constitutional law it took to stop such an act.

Of course the federal government would try and stop with violence any secession attempt, which shows how truly free we actually are. Nullification is another answer that has worked multiple times in the past, and could easily work again as the step before secession.

Wisconsin effectively nullified the Fugitive Slave Act this way. The key would be if enough states were willing to do so under federal pressure.

Paul X said...

Well, I think you go too far. While secession without war seems a little unlikely, it certainly is possible. The end of the Soviet empire was in some respects a massive, mostly peaceful secession. If it can happen with the Soviets, it can happen here too.

As to the secession petitions, yes, to petition to secede is silly. One does not ask permission when the answer is sure to be no. But the petitions do serve one very useful function - getting people thinking and talking about secession (and nullification too). Thought precedes action...

Anonymous said...

Liberalism as a political movement (it never was a political philosophy, for the very good reason that it fails to approach the level of philosophy at all) never made sense in spite of the fact that the majority of Americans since the War Between the States have been liberals, whether they knew it or not. It took what James Kalb calls advanced liberalism, coming in the last quarter of the 20th century, to bring the American public to a sort of political Great Awakening, in which they find themselves, somewhat groggily, shaking themselves and rubbing their eyes. Or rather, one half of the American public, the other having converted—as it seems, irredeemably—to the advanced-liberal ideology, which is really the old liberalism stretched and distorted and pummeled from its youthful naive falsity into senile surrealism. The arrival of advanced liberalism has divided the United States between the New and the Old America, a division that is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future but is becoming, rather, more fixed and rigid. Liberalism in the era of Obama represents for the Old American culture what Islam does for the culture of Old Europe. “[B]e­tween us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . . ” Liberals blame an unenlightened reactionary mass for the divide, but in truth the fault is theirs, and all theirs. Advanced liberalism demands that people think, believe, and act in ways that it is simply unnatural for human beings to think, believe, and act, and it is unlikely that it will win over a greater proportion of Americans to those ways than it has managed thus far to do. The battle lines have been drawn. America is fated to remain a house divided against herself for many generations, and afterward to share the inevitable fate of all divided houses, which are by nature ungovernable, and hence unlivable.

A century and a half ago the United States wasted the greatest opportunity in American history to divide peacefully into two geographic sections, each left to go its own way. Our ancestors had their chance, and they threw it aside. (Had they not, the fastidious Yankees of our own time would enjoy the inestimable satisfaction of requiring the Neanderthal Confederates to obtain visas before traveling North.) For four terrible years, the United States suffered the War Between the States. That was terrible enough, but that was all it was - a conflict between two discrete opposing unions. Today, she faces the prospect of real civil war, a war among citizens that cannot be settled by the physical separation of the adherents of the two sides, who, to a greater or a lesser degree, are integrated one with the other across an entire continent. The day may yet come when America will rue the chance she long ago refused, to separate what Orestes Brownson called the personal or barbaric democracy of the South from the humanitarian democracy of the North. (He preferred the first kind.) The problem then was a simple one, and so was the solution. Today, it has become an impossible problem, for which there is no imaginable solution. Modern Americans do indeed exhibit a tendency to settle in communities according to their own kind - not just racially and ethnically compatible communities but politically agreeable ones as well. (One thinks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City.) But these demographic self-rearrangements are insufficient to the scope of the difficulty, save on a statewide basis, in which case the resulting bloc of states would be unlikely to enjoy a convenient geographic contiguity. Whatever the solution - if there is a solution - turns out to be, it is clearly impossible that the United States should continue as she is going, trapped in a state of radical instability and wracked by the most profound public dissensions and animosities that inevitably acquire a personal dimension. (Chilton Williamson, Jr., "The New American Mob", Chronicles, July 2010, pp. 17 - 18.)

http://heartlandrevolt.squarespace.com/

Eleutherius

Anonymous said...

I too believe that secession is possible without violence. I also think that secession, at some point in the not too distant future, is inevitable. One note: In most of the pieces that I have read on the subject, the writer almost always connects the desire for secession with a kneee-jerk reaction to the latest election results. Either this is deliberate spin or gross miscalculation. There is a long held and growing belief among many Americans that our nation is headed over the collectivist cliff. The latest election has only confirmed that already held belief.